The ultimate reason that Americans are unable to discipline their children is that they have no authority over them. The American state, together with private industry, especially the "helping professions," have usurped their authority in loco parentis, thus empowering physicians, psychologists, judges, social workers, dentists and other health workers by, in effect, reducing people to parental incompetence. American children run amuck, throw tantrums in the "terrible twos" and "fearsome fours," and commit indignities against their parents and maliciously disobey them such as to shock the rest of the world. A Eda Leshan in 1985 published a book called When Your Child Drives You Crazy. Children's actual socialization comes from the ever-present baby sitter, television, and the school, neighborhood pals and their interaction at play.

American parents are reduced to their entertainers, meal tickets and gift givers; in the U.S. the glorification of consumption and the warfare of status materialism see the parents constantly showering their "kids" with presents, all too often in place of true love and affection. The mother resorts to shrewishness and constant nagging to obtain minimal obedience from her children, while the deadbeat American husband and father has emotionally abandoned the family and takes little part in family life. A 1971 study by college psychologists of fathers in the Boston area found that they spent a grand total of 37 seconds a day on average spending time with their infants. Parents do not guide, comfort, govern, teach, nurse, control, restrain or mentor their children, although they are fond of giving them a good teasing now and then.

Hmmm...kids who demand new cell phones every two months, gym shoes for thousands of dollars...

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Permissive child rearing abets the political status quo by producing people of political reaction who are insecure, anxious, conformist, competitive and status-conscious; it hence is an integral part of social control, a fact the right-wing critique does not realize. The helping professions, which as Lasch noted did so much, beginning about 1880 and gaining ascendance during the Progressive Era, to promote parental incompetence, acted under the hegemony of American ideology, which is that any man can become rich.

The world owes the universal acknowledgment of the concept of ideology to Marx, who popularized it as a revolutionary and political philosopher as the rationale and justification of the class in power and sub rosa of its culpable wrongs and injustice...Being raised devoid of comforting, love, discipline, affection and physical caring (such as hugging, caressing, holding, breast-feeding, kissing, embracing and cuddling, of which American parents give their children so very little), Americans in their collective folly are frustrated, anxiety-ridden, insecure, enraged, angry, unhappy and selfish. The ensuing hostile, violent and rancorous social scene, besides moral chaos, social disintegration, barratry and generational conflict, is remarkable for the unprecedented intensification of social conflict: Marx's class warfare, Hobbes' social warfare (the bellum omnium contra omnes), and Machiavelli's political warfare. Can anyone therefore really wonder at Waco, Ruby Ridge, Oklahoma City, Columbine, Virginia Tech, Aurora, and Newtown? Absalom, Absalom!